They asked for 20 minutes of music to be divided into four or five sections, but it's not just the one piece, because what I've designed is a whole evening's worth of entertainment, including some older pieces that have been re-orchestrated for this particular group, and pieces from the Synclavier. For the concerts, we will be joined on stage by a Canadian dance troupe called La La La Human Steps. They're quite unbelievable. The other thing that's going to he interesting about the presentation is the six-channel P.A. system. I don't think anybody's ever heard anything quite like this in a live situation. It's set up with a stereo pair in the front, a stereo pair in the middle, and a stereo pair in the rear.

That concept is really going to change sound a lot.

Well, it won't, because in order to listen to something in six channels, you need a six-channel source, which means a six-channel mix. Now, who can do that? Any recording artist could do it, if they wanted to do the same kind of setup in their house, if they're working on their album, after they finish their stereo mix, they might want to do a six-channel mix. It can be done, but most of the artists would be too lazy. They're not even curious about it.

Whether or not it becomes popular as a consumer setup, the possibilities seem to open up the whole art of composing beyond simply picking cool notes or neat samples.

Yeah. Considering the sophistication of today's audio consumer, once you get to the point that you like the sound of CDs and vinyl is an aberration, then you're ready to go the next step, which is to have an audio environment rather than just music-minus-tape-hiss. This is never going to be something for people's homes, because most people don't live in places where you can install this without starting a civil war with either your parents or your neighbors. There are already people banging on the walls if you play your hi-fi too loud with two speakers. What the fuck are they going to do if someone installs one of these?

What I would like to sec happen with it is to have concert halls designed to accommodate performance of six-channel playback, whether it's a six-channel miked ensemble, or pre-recorded material in six-channel. But to have some kind of an installation where people can come and hear it. It could even be like a coffeehouse-type thing, where you have a conversation while surrounded by a composition. That might be a nice environment. That's feasible. I understand that in Japan, at a Kyoto exposition, they had a multi-channel playback system. But it opens up the possibility of special suites in hotels or, if you can imagine, an audio spa.

The potential of it reminds me of an historic place in Vienna called the Havelka. It's a coffee shop that has been there since Schubert, I guess, and the main entertainment is newspapers on a stick, and a little classical music in the back-ground, and every known form of coffee and Viennese crullers - little pastry things with some powdered sugar sprinkled on top. This place is so bizarre, because there's not that much conversation, just people reading newspapers on a stick. It's owned by this old woman named Mrs. Havelka, who's been running it since birth, I think, and the walls are covered with things from famous composers and authors who paid their bill by writing "graphic currency." Vienna's funny that way. Apparently Wagner stayed at the Hotel Imperial one time, and to pay his bill he handed over some pages from Parsiful that are still on the wall in the coffee shop.

The guy who was the first promoter for the first Mothers Of Invention concert in Vienna was this guy named Joachim Lieben - otherwise known as Joey Love, the guy with the perpetual ski tan. Joey was not only the only rock and roll promoter in town, he was also on the board of directors of [music publisher] Universal Editions. For me, going to Vienna was like [dramatically] "12-Tone Country." A music store in Vienna means there arc scores in the window, and I was out of my mind! You can walk down the street, and suddenly here's a little shop with Webern scores in the window. So Joey was the guy who took us over there, because he was split between two worlds. He was bringing in rock groups but at the same time promoting classical concerts, and on the board of this modem music publishing concern.

Will he be involved in the concerts in September?

No, the promoter in September - this group has been in existence for ten years, and the guy who did the most to organize and put them on the map was Karsten Witt. He had a real talent for organization and helped them make a deal to get an industrial building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, which is their permanent laboratory. It's fantastic what they've done to it: triple-walled rehearsal studios, a climate-controlled basement full of percussion equipment of every description, a massive collection of really good professional equipment, individual rehearsal halls, a small auditorium for press conferences and recitals on the ground floor. The third-floor offices are all modern office equipment and communications, and the top floor is a concert hall with a 20-foot ceiling with windows that look out over Frankfurt on the top of this industrial building out in cement-plant country, and that's their facility. Anyway, Karsten helped them put this together. When the project first began Karsten was about to turn aver the reins to Andreas Mohler-Zebhauzer, who's the boss now, because Karsten got the job of being the director of the Vienna Festvolker. So when he went to Vienna part of his concert schedule for 1992 was to bring in the Ensemble with my project.

A building like that must be very expensive. They must be well funded.

Well, they share the building with a group called the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, which is really their orchestra but it's all young non-professionals. Part of the money comes from the city of Frankfurt, and the rest of it comes from their concert revenues. They have records, but they're all on small, obscure European labels.

They must be really pulling people in to survive on concert revenues.

If they do 2,000 people a night, it's a major turnout. I think for modern music, even though it's supported more in Europe than it is here, still if you get more than 500 people at a concert you're doing something special, because there are just too many other things to attract the concert dollar. But this year's budget for the Frankfurt Festival, which is the overall umbrella in which this event is occurring, I think is $6.7 million for the month. And for that amount they have to mount all these concerts for Cage, Stockhausen, my stuff, and I think Kagel. It's a week for each composer, and it coincides with Cage's 80th birthday.

There's no American city that would ever raise six million dollars for something like this.

Yeah, and you also have to realize that during this same period of time many other German cities have their own fucking festival going on with equal budgets. Cologne's probably got something just as big and just as elaborate. Berlin has something simultaneously. In fact, one of the orchestras in Berlin is playing my music at the same time. Also during that week in Frankfurt, there's two orchestras which will be playing two of my pieces - one on Monday and one on Friday. And then the Ensemble dates are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Tell me more about the six-channel playback system.

The orchestra will be seated in social groups, and each group will have a minimum of four mikes on it, and some will have six, so that these four- or six-channel matrices can all be superimposed on each other within the six-channel matrix. Then there will be a character, probably dressed as a religious figure, who will be carrying a special device which I've concocted. It's a six- channel fishpole. Now imagine a small hula hoop, and imagine six small but very high-quality microphones attached to this hoop, and the hoop is on the end of this stick, and it's dressed up to look like a religious artifact. The religious figure will be followed by a small religious slave who will carry his religious wire so it doesn't get tangled. And when - let's call him The Bishop - The Bishop approaches you with the hoop, what the house mixer is going to do is cross-fade between a static position - like from the social groups - to just the output of the six-channel hoop. Let's say you are a trumpet player, and you're playing a solo, and here comes The Bishop. What the audience hears is a trumpet directly overhead as The Bishop approaches you. But as he takes the hoop and puts it past the bell in the trumpet and over your head, the audience hears a trumpet going through the floor. Do you see the relationship between the six mikes on the hoop and the six speakers in the auditorium? The net audio result would be that all sorts of space games can be played by relocating the hoop. You can conceive how it's experienced in the audience. It's a pretty simple-minded solution to this problem, but I don't think anybody's ever done this before.

The series of concerts will be a gratifying honor. Are you looking forward to it, or dreading it?

Well, both, because this is probably the most complicated concert music project I've ever been involved in. The logistics of it are staggering. And there are budgetary constraints. I mean if this was rock and roll, and you were going to go out to do all this stuff, you know you could sell a lot of seats, and you could make a lot of money, and you could do a lot of things if you took that money and turned it back into the production. But when you're dealing with a 2,500-seat hall and this kind of music, the economic structure is not the same.

Do you have to pay for a lot of this?

No. As a matter of fact, for the first time in history ladies and gentlemen, they have paid me. And they've paid me enough money that I have been able to work on this thing for about a year. But that's just for delivering to them notes on paper. The problems arise when you start trying to figure out how to make the thing sound the way it's supposed to sound in these environments and pick it up and move it to two other locations. Andreas Mohler-Zebhauser, the director of the Ensemble, has been going around Europe trying to find the extra financing to make all this happen. And if he does not succeed in doing that, we'll have to find some kind of a Plan B.

Also, we've been talking with Neve, and although we don't have a contract with them to do this, I think that they're going to try to help me get a board with some sort of automation attachment that will allow me to do these cross-fades from the static social groups to the Bishop. Not only is it going to be recorded in a studio, but we're also planning on recording the live concerts.

How much impact do daily events, small or large, have on your work as an artist?

In terms of the news or in terms of what happens around the house?

The birth of children, the news, whatever.

Well, they both have an impact. If I see something that really pisses me off, there's no way I can shake it off. It'll either keep me from working altogether or send me in a blind rage to the Synclavier. Some things are just so depressing that I can't work at all. I'll just go to sleep. I'll just have to sleep it off, because it's like having a mountain of bad vibes dumped on you.

Some artists claim that there should be a separation between themselves and those sort of things, as though they can remove themselves from whatever they're doing.

Who are these artists? What an important question to ask before you buy their album!

What sort of sociological "lemming effect" do you see in the rise of the guitar superhero?

I don't have a speech I make about this, but my observation is that guitar playing as currently understood has more to do with sports than it does to do with music. It's an Olympic-challenge type of situation. The challenges are in the realm of speed, redundancy, choreography, and grooming.

I remember an historical theory stating that the end of any century usually was marked by terrific declines in everything from arts to politics. As we careen toward the year 2000 do you think there's some sort of planetary "trigger" that goes off and creates bizarre phenomena like guitar superheroes who just play as fast as they possibly can?

I don't think that the guitar superhero mentality is an evil unto itself. We have to go back to the real evil, the MBA mentality, because this phenomenon could not proliferate if it weren't being manufactured, widely distributed, and supported by enormous industrial forces. Otherwise it would be just laughable. You can't look at something like that, which on its face is truly laughable, and laugh at it when so many people with so much money are taking it so seriously. And that's the message that goes out to the next generation of "guitar heroes." In a way, it's like the message in those ads which you'll see if you ever watch television during the daytime to find out what women get to see for commercials. In the middle of the Sally Jessie Raphael show, there are all these commercials for lawyers who will be happy to sue your employer because you felt stress. Have you ever seen these things? One commercial shows a happy couple - you - on the bow of a yacht clinking champagne glasses together because you had the wisdom and fortitude to dial this number and sue your employer because you experienced stress.

In the "Guitar Clone" article you did for Guitar Player, you stated that the entire population, even guitar players, "has been transmuted into a reasonably well-groomed odor-free consumer amoeba that is kept alive only to service manufacturers and lives its life by the motto: biggest, fastest, loudest, mostest, and best. " What a motto. What's a motto that you wish we could substitute?

I think we should avoid mottos. Mottos are what you're left with when society becomes freeze-dried. If you can reduce everything to a motto, you're in deep shit. I mean, that's the message. We are in deep shit. And it's getting deeper, and nobody wants to bail it.

How do we get out of this, Mr. Frank?

I don't think we're getting out. I think that we must adapt. The human organism is fairly flexible, and the United States is being transformed into something truly hideous, and those who wish to continue to live here and function as Americans are going to have to find some way to adapt. You're going to have to find a way to drink foul water, breathe foul air, eat semi-poisonous and/or non-foods, and find some way to keep a job so that you can spend money to experience the thrill of these things.

Sounds pretty exciting.

Well, that's evolution. We have evolved to this. Look, every senior citizen who's asking, "What's going to happen to my benefits?" can think back to the days when they told little Sonny, "Be a lawyer; it's a good job," because these are the people who went out and did their job and found ways to make their job pay better by creating more laws that were even more baffling, that caused the average person to need them. So when you have a society that is addicted to lawyers, addicted to credit, addicted to stupidity with nowhere to go and nobody to sell it to, what do you call that? I mean, is that Apocalypse Now or what?

Lorin Hollander says that some of your music is painfully beautiful. I don't know if you hear it that way. And even in your instrumental music, where we don't have the words going on, you put humor in the liner notes. Is that coming out of this political feeling you have, or is it an organizational element whereby you're creating a contrast between something very moving and something very funny, or is it to keep these sort of emotions at a distance, or am I intellectualizing too much?

I think you're intellectualizing too much. You can reduce it to this - you can ask this question: Is it possible to laugh while fucking? I think yes.

What about the issue of the ethics of sampling? At what point does the line become gray?

I think that, aesthetically a case can be made in both directions. If there was really some superbly artistic reason for taking massive chunks of James Brown albums, or whatever it is that you're stealing to create this unique new collage that required a wholesale chunk of James Brown texture in order for you to do your art, then I think James Brown ought to get paid, and James Brown's record company, which actually owns the copyright on the master or the chunk of the master that's used, they ought to get paid. And if you can't do your art without stealing chunks of James Brown, and you don't want to pay James Brown, then find some other art to do.

How long has it been since you've played guitar?

A long time.

Do you fiddle anymore?

Well, I keep one sitting by my chair in the studio, and when there's some boring mechanical process going on, I'll pick it up and plink a few notes on it, but I don't really play it. I just touch it every once in a while.

All the years that you were considered a great guitar player, were you trying to be a guitar hero, or were you using it merely as a musical tool?

I like music, and the guitar just happened to be the instrument that I play, rather than piano or accordion or bugle. I was never really a guitar fetishist, and all the stuff that goes along with the guitar-hero mentality is alien to me.

Do you think you've lost your skills, aside from having your calluses turn to marshmallows?

I don't think I can play anymore. I don't have any motivation to play. I don't have any backing group that would allow me to do the kinds of things that I do. They're begging me to do something in this show in Germany, and that's one of the things that I dread, because I think the audience will probably he expecting it, too. And it's difficult to go on stage with just a little stick in your hand and no guitar after 25 or 30 years of doing it the other way. So that's going to be hard. It depends on what you're trying to do on the guitar. I mean, if you know how to play chords, it's not likely that you're going to forget all the chords. But improvising a solo comes from places in your brain or someplace else in your body that can be adversely affected. And I don't feel right playing guitar. It's an uncomfortable feeling.

How do you view yourself in the world of music? Do you have a sense of place vis-a-vis other serious composers?

Well, yes: basically, that I don't belong [laughs].

There's nobody like you. Nobody does anything like what you do.

That's true, so therefore . . . what? Three dots. . . .

How did that happen?

My taste was just different.

From early childhood on.

Yeah.

And you had the good sense to listen to your self rather than to other people. That's a unique characteristic and must somehow be tied into being a successful artist.

Today the most successful artists never listen to themselves. They always listen to the managers of the corporations that keep them going. Because, in today's world, if you afford yourself the luxury of following your own artistic whims, you'll be out of a contract. You'll no longer have that tennis shoe endorsement or that soft drink endorsement. You'll be a bad person. You'll be forgotten. You'll he stacked up with Flock Of Seagulls and name the next one. You'll be on the rack with those guys. Everybody is so well-behaved today.

Do you think that there might be people sitting out there working as night clerks in motels writing symphonies that will never be heard? Or have even those people finally given up?

I think there are still probably a few left. And I only say that because of the mathematical probabilities that, evil as the current system is, it's not so efficient that it can kill us all. There are a few stragglers out there. You'll never hear what they do, though. That's the problem. Unless you can hear music by reading it off paper.

You don't think a scenario might unfold in the future like in the past, when Felix Mendelssohn found a ream of paper with notes on it, which turned out to be the works of Bach, who had been forgotten for the prior hundred years? Do you think there's any future hope for excavation of these motel music writers?

No, because it's tied to economics. Look at it mechanically. In a society where the economic system sets aside money to finance cultural activities, maybe. In a society that is based purely on profit versus cost, the mathematical probabilities of anything like that happening, ever, are so small as to be not worth considering. Let me contrast just this one other thing. One of the best-kept secrets in American life is the attendance annually at museums by the American people. More people go to museums every year than attend football and baseball combined. It's the best-kept secret in this country. The desire of the average person to consume something other than shit is there, but the people do not control the hand that turns the crank that redirects the river of shit in their direction. They have no control over these guys who have made the decision that this is what they want, and this is what they'll get. And they'll get more of it, and the flow will never stop. But I don't think that the American species is so debased that they have given up on all hope of a cultural life. It's just that they have no concept of how to achieve it or really understand why it's worth preserving. And that's what's so sad about museum attendance, because stuff in a museum is dead. It's cultural necrophilia. A museum should exist, yeah; you should go and see the past, you should see that treasured little thing - whatever it is. But that's like the mentality of the guy who wanted to shut down the patent office in the early 1900s because it was the official government point of view that everything had already been invented.

There's a part of me that wants to believe that somehow there will be a great sweeping away of all these forces of ignorance and evil, and these people who long for something that uplifts their spirit or entertains their eye and ear will get what they want.

Well, right now, the desire to consume that stuff - the need - is being fulfilled on a local and regional and even domestic level by people recording things on little home studios for their own amusement and the amusement of their friends. That's the equivalent of the guy in the motel writing the symphony. It's the guy with his little Fostex making his own demos even though he's never going to get a contract. And it's like the revolution in home video. People arc shooting what they want to see - basically, themselves fucking.

I keep thinking of your comment about attendance at museums, and I keep wondering about the contempt that somebody must hold for the American public, of what they would or wouldn't enjoy hearing, or seeing, or doing.

It's more than just contempt. The people who make these decisions don't even care about the public at all. It's beyond contempt for them. They have a special agenda, anything status duo, which means maintaining the current administration. They'll put up with whatever they can handle in Congress, but the idea is to subjugate the population. All ideas have to he subjugated, behavior has to he subjugated. And the problem is if it were an ingenious policy and somebody found an ingenious way to inflict the policy, then everything might he sort of okay. But what you've got is a really stupid policy with an ingenious way of inflicting it. They're much better at the methodology of inflicting suppression than they are in coming up with a creative policy that is worth inflicting on the public.

What my naivete prevents me from understanding is how this mechanism evolved, and what the breeding process is that gives us the officials or bureaucrats or politicians that enforce and perpetuate it.

For one thing, there was this entity created by Ronald Reagan called the Department of Domestic Diplomacy. If you look in the Iran-Contra manual, you'll find out.

This is not a joke.

It's not a joke. The guy that he put in charge of running this thing had no address, no phone number. You couldn't call the Washington directory and get the number of the Department of Domestic Diplomacy. The guy who ran it was Otto Reich, who used to he the head of disinformation for the CIA. You should get the Iran-Contra thing and look it up in the table of contents. I had heard a rumor about this thing. I couldn't believe that it was real. I went on C-SPAN and talked about it. And I started getting phone calls from people saying, "Yeah, it is real." And one guy faxed me the actual pages from the Iran-Contra book that had the whole story of this thing in there. And as far as I know, it was never disbanded The thing still exists, unless there's been a miracle. It's just like Cointelpro under Nixon. Cointelpro was what they were trying to hide with Watergate. It wasn't just breaking into the Democratic headquarters. What they're trying to cover up is the fact that Nixon had decided to create a secret police. There was no legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens. He felt he had enemies everywhere, so he created a program called Cointelpro. It was all the domestic spying on political groups, people he perceived as enemies. And since it couldn't exist under law, it had to he financed by a slush fund.

He went out to investors?

There were plenty of investors for Nixon. For example, a lot of people don't realize that Marcos gave him 1.5 million dollars. If you've got a right-wing fascist idea, there's plenty of people who will give you money to pull it off.

Was this going to operate somehow under Nixon or under the CIA, or the FBI?

I think that it was a stand-alone operation, but under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. It was so corrupt, and it was such an affront to democracy, and most people don't realize it already happened. The other thing that happened under Reagan is that in the early part of his administration, he signed a presidential order, a presidential finding, a directive that finally gave the CIA legal permission to spy on U.S. citizens.

Is this still in effect?

Yes. It was done as part of the war on drugs. That's scary.

How do you get so informed on this?

People send me stuff. I look at every different news source that I can find, and read between the lines, and the rest of the time you watch C-SPAN, and every news story that comes on raises a question. The first question is, why is that story on and not something else? And then what about the spin? You know, when they tell you a story, how are they spin-doctoring it?